In This Issue

If one sets aside media based on direct sunlight—semaphores, smoke signals, flag codes in ocean-going fleets—the mid-nineteenth-century telegraphic code marks a break point in human history between several millennia of coded information that moved only as fast as some physical body moved (horse, courier, ship, or still sluggish steam powered vehicles) and the past century and a half in which coded information can move at the speed of light. Shock waves from this technological revolution (a term often mis-used but apt here) continue to attract the attention of historians and social scientists. At bottom this enduring interest resides in a tension between corporeal and electronic experience. Most information moves across distances so great, in volumes of such magnitude, and at speeds so daunting that human beings continually wrestle with the challenge of integrating speed of light media with the ancient pace of bodies, hormones, and neurological networks. Speed of light vs. speeds of body.

T&C does not often plan theme issues in advance. Occasionally, however, scholars working independently of one another address the same core question set and come to publishable maturity in the same time frame; think of July 2008 when T&C published eight articles about water touching four continents across two millennia. So too with the four articles in this final issue of the sixty published from Southeast Michigan. All four concentrate on media stories that occurred during the three to four decades that straddle the opening of the twenrtieth century. Taken as an unintentional but welcome set, they concentrate on a cluster of thematic threads which have caught the attention of other scholars in T&C's recent volumes: the tangle of competitions among innovators in an electronic landscape that can be wired or wireless, point-to-point or broadcast, amateur or corporate. To refresh the memory, here follows a list of fifteen T&C articles about electronic competition (since T&C Vol. 41) and a shorter list of three recent studies of patent law.

Competition on the Electronic Landscape

"A Network of Tinkerers: The Advent of the Radio and Television Receiver Industry in Japan" (Yuzo Takahashi, July 2000)

"The Sultan's Messenger: Cultural Constructions of Ottoman Telegraphy, 1847–1880" (Yakup Bektas, October 2000)

"Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies, and Hidden Workers: The Spaces of Labor in Information Internetworks" (Greg Downey, April 2001)

"Satellite Communications, Globalization, and the Cold War" (Hugh R Slotten, April 2002)

"Picturephone and the Information Age: The Social Meaning of Failure" (Kenneth Lipartito, January 2003)

"'What These People Need Is Radio': New Technology, the Press, and Otherness in 1920s America" (Randall Patnode, April 2003)

"The 'Freer Men' of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance" (Kristen Haring, October 2003)

"Scientific Fact or Engineering Specification? The U.S. Navy's Experiments on Long-Range Wireless Telegraphy Circa 1910" (Chen-Pang Yeang, January 2004)

"Forbidden Frequencies: Sino-American Relations and Chinese Broadcasting during the Interwar Era" (Michael A Krysko, October 2004)

"Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community" (Fred Turner, July 2005)

"'The Confusion Provoked by Instantaneous Discussion': The New International Communications Network and the Chilean Crisis of 1891–1892 in the United States" (John A. Britton, October 2007)

"Radio's Hidden Voice: Noncommercial Broadcasting, Extension Education, and State Universities during the 1920s" (Hugh R. Slotten, January 2008)

"A Wavelength for Every Network: Synchronous Broadcasting and National Radio in the United States, 1926–1932" (Michael J. Socolow, January 2008)

"A Bold New Vision: The VOA Radio Ring Plan and Global Broadcasting in the Early Cold War" (Timothy Stoneman, April 2009)

"War and Peacetime Research on the Road to Crystal Frequency Control" (Shaul Katzir, January 2010)

Patents

"Patents and Power: European Patent-System Integration in the Context of Globalization" (Eda Kranakis, October 2007)

"The Emergence of the Professional Patent Practitioner" (Kara Swanson, July 2009)

"Redefininng Vulcanization: Charles Goodyear, Patents, and Industrial Control, 1834–1865" (Cai Guise-Richardson, April 2010)

Readers who take breaks between reading Gabriele Balbi's "Radio before Radio: Araldo Telefonico and the Invention of Italian Broadcasting" and Noah Arceneaux's "Wanamaker's Department Store and the Origins of Electronic Media, 1910...